A wandering sage of the first century who talked with the Brahmans of India, drove a demon out of a wedding, and vanished from an emperor's courtroom.
Press this book. Your gift commissions the Great Library’s word-by-word interlinear The Life of Apollonius of Tyana — and the day it is made, it is free for everyone, forever. You are not buying a copy; you are paying for it to exist.
Give what you like — a few dollars helps, or fund the whole of Book I · the birth and become its Founder. Every contribution presses it closer to real.
This is how every Great Library book reads, word beneath word. The Life of Apollonius of Tyana’s own first lines appear here the day its pilot is pressed.
The life of Apollonius, a Pythagorean holy man from Tyana in Cappadocia, born early in the first century AD. He gives away his inheritance, keeps silent for five years, travels to Babylon, India and Egypt, and stands trial before the emperor Domitian. It is being pressed now, starting with his birth, and can't be read here yet. Your support gets the first pages made.
Flavius Philostratus wrote it in eight books in the early third century AD, at the request of the empress Julia Domna, and finished it after her death in 217. Around 300 a Roman official named Hierocles used it to argue that Apollonius was a greater wonder-worker than Christ, and the church historian Eusebius wrote a reply. That quarrel is why the book is sometimes called the pagan gospel.
His birth is announced to his mother by the Egyptian sea-god Proteus, and she gives birth in a meadow while swans sing around her. The demon at Corinth is a lamia, a beautiful woman engaged to one of his students, the story Keats turned into his poem Lamia. Philostratus writes an ornate, knowing Greek for a literary court, and word by word you can see him enjoying it.
Making an interlinear The Life of Apollonius of Tyana is real work — freezing a scholarly source text, aligning every word to its dictionary form, glossing what resists translation, and proofing it all to a hard quality bar. Pressing a book is how that work gets funded. When enough readers press it, Book I · the birth gets made — and then it is free to read forever, for you and for everyone who comes after.
This isn’t a purchase. It’s a commission. You’re not buying a copy — you’re paying for the thing to exist, and putting your name (if you like) on the first true The Life of Apollonius of Tyana that anyone can read for free.
Leave your email and we’ll write to you the day the The Life of Apollonius of Tyana opens — no other mail, ever.
Read our finished collection · the library · The Great Library Project
Reading is always free. Patrons and founders are the ones who keep it that way.